


Vincit Qui Patitur

by Nikita (accioidioto)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study- Pansy Parkinson, F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 15:12:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13929693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/accioidioto/pseuds/Nikita
Summary: He conquers who endures.Or in this case, Pansy learns to live.This is unbetaed, so be kind. Also, I am looking for an beta, so if you are interested, let me know in the comments and we can figure something out.





	Vincit Qui Patitur

The first memory Pansy has of her mother is Ansley slapping her hand away from the carefully arranged hair sitting on top of Pansy’s head. “I spent a great deal of money on you tonight- do take care of your appearance.”

 

Even then her mother had been beautiful, in the Old Blood sort of fashion that was prevalent among pure-bloods. She had blood-red lips, and creamy skin, like the Muggle fairytale of Snow White.

 

(“If you want to be something,” Ansley always says, “best look the part.” The same woman stands at the entrance to their wizarding home, when Pansy greets her, muddled in cloaks and overcoats, ever regal.)

 

Pansy does not pout, but her fingers itch for the rest of dinner, sticky with the last of her childlike wonder. She is introduced to a milk-white boy, and an egregiously pretty boy, and she looks at the fine slope of their shoulders and the aristocratic angles of their noses, and wrinkles her nose at the reedy thin harmony of the discordant voices of the adults around them.

 

“Would you care,” Pansy says, in the way the over privileged children did when playing dress-up, “to move this party elsewhere?”

 

Draco had laughed at her, pudgy cheeks and impudence in equal measure, carrying the weight of a lost family name, even at that age. But when Pansy looked at him in impatience, he had subsided, and tagged along with a misplaced sense of superiority.

 

The three of them spend their first year at Hogwarts with the same sense of misplaced superiority. Draco turns his nose up at the Boy-Who-Lived, and regurgitates the words his father beats into him. He is silver and white, aptly shaped like the constellation, but he does not yet understand where the real power in his house resides.

 

Pansy does. She watches as Narcissa floats towards her mother, Lucius skulking in her shadow. She watches as her own mother, as Ansley, tilts her head at the correct angle and says the correct things at the correct times, and watches the manners in which they treat their husbands.

 

She watches. She learns a great many things by just _being_ , by just acting the part and looking the part her mother teaches her to play. For it is Ansley who guides the political maneuvering and the strategically placed bank deposits.

 

It is Ansley who visits her, late at night in the bedchamber, and presses her cool, white hands to Pansy’s face, telling her how to fight the imaginary demons. When Pansy is little, she dreams of the tools of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and Ansley demonstrates how to counterattack their attacks.

 

It is because of this that Pansy learns to stay and operate in the shadows. Her place is to watch, and learn, and survive, survive in a landscape where her name and her money have increasingly less influence.

 

She watches Draco and Blaise. The boy who sneers in Blaise’s face, and calls him a whore’s son finds himself inexplicably stuck into a Body-Bind in a Closet for a week, starving, and nearly dying. Snape only sighs when he finds him, and pulls Pansy aside too advice her to find _less extreme measures_ , and to _act with a modicum of discretion- for God’s sake, Miss Parkinson, they know I am the Slytherin House Headmaster_.

 

Pansy smiles at him, and lies with a silver tongue and a mouth full of teeth. Because Harry Potter throws a sock in Lucius’s face, and Draco watches the person he idolize lose a bit more of his façade.

 

He is still blind, however, and Pansy calls him _foolish_ , and skulks back into the kitchens to bully some of the house-elves into giving her a cup of tea and some scones. They sit on his bed when Draco comes in, and Pansy thinks that Lucius is draining him, bit by bit, of _himself_.

 

She then comes home to a father who introduces her to a Carrow. The Parkinson’s might have had a solid standing in the Ministry, but the Carrows control the understudy of the Minister himself. So she smiles at him, a perfectly polite one, but frets into the main course over the looks he is giving her.

 

Her mom glares at her, a subtle flick of her eyes. _Get it together- if you want to be the part, you must act the part_. She smiles, and says the things they want her to, and returns his slick smiles. Everything about the nephew is slick and impenetrable, and Pansy does not entertain herself on what won’t be allowed.

 

He comes over, and sits. Pansy watches the thick knuckles of his hands and opens her palm on her knee.

 

(She does not have the ladylike hands she used to have in the beginning of first year- there was an incident with Blaise that left her with bruised knuckles, and a wounded ego. He had hauled her to her feet, and told Pansy he would help her practice with the air of a smug victor.

 

Pansy had readily agreed- she needed more strengths than she needed weaknesses.)

 

Pansy is only 15. But she can punch and fight and block as well as any street fighter, and the world will know. His smile does not waver, but Pansy sits with a straighter back, and a more sharp tongue.

 

Flora and Festia Carrow take her aside at a gathering, later that same summer. They speak the same way Pansy does, in clever words and even cleverer gestures. It’s a warning, subtle, to not upset Aquila, for he loves mindless torture, much like his aunt and uncle.

 

Pansy cocks her head at them. “Funny,” she says, in measured words. “I could think this was a threat.”

 

Festia narrows her eyes at her. “Don’t be absurd, Pansy. You know better than I do that us Carrows never do things in direct terms.”

 

Flora interjects over her sister’s shoulders, the blunt edge to her sister’s knife. “It’s a warning. Be aware of yourself, Parkinson- his attention is never a good thing.”

 

Pansy has been a shadow, a ghost all her life. The shadow of Draco, the ghost to her mother. It is what she has been trained to be, and the idea she has failed has the delicate stem of the glass drink trembling in her hand. She calms her anger, and watches Aquila the way he watched her, and catalogues the fine point between his shoulder, the place where he is most vulnerable, and practices empty curses inside her head.

 

Sixth year brings a Dark Mark on Draco’s forearm, and Pansy is proud of Draco. She has never seen the value of Muggleborn, or being without magic. This is a Parkinson, someone who sneers at Squibs and laughs without humor at magicless people.

 

Pansy still has yet to learn the value of ingenuity, of what it means to never depend on the current running through her skin. She will. But those winter days are yet to come, but not so far off as one might think.

 

For now, she smiles, razor sharp, unaware of the Boy-Who-Lived hiding above them, the revulsion and fear roiling through his stomach.

 

Draco isn’t proud, however. He is a paper-thin caricature of himself, a boy so clever, and one with idiocy as well. His father fades in the background, and his mother hides the tremble in her hands, while Pansy and Draco follow an old leader and even older prejudices, never bothering to open their eyes.

 

Pansy doesn’t see much of Blaise. He skulks into classrooms, eyes skittish with unintended knowledge. Pansy watches him skirt around her periphery, much like a startled bird for three months, but on the first of November, she waits for him in the stacks near the Forbidden Books section.

 

(She and Blaise and Draco had gone snuck into the section once, during fifth year, flushing with excitement of the Triwizard Tournament, laughing their asses off at how _Potter_ had undoubtedly put his name into the cup. Draco had said it, _Potter_ , a lovely caress on his tongue.

 

When Pansy looked at him, he flushed up to his hairline, and Blaise laughed in the cramped space, his breath puffing up the hair on Pansy’s neck. Blaise had teased Draco about the perils of being so pale, and Pansy had blocked them out once they had gotten to the foreplay.)

 

“What.” Blaise says, not even a question.

 

Pansy folds herself onto the table, safe in the knowledge the librarian won’t even come near here- she had some old superstitions about curses. “I can wait,” she informs him primly, folding her skirt under her legs. His tie is askew, and Pansy aches in her stomach.

 

But, oh, she had forgotten how well he played this game. They sit there for three hours, hiding when Finch comes by.

 

“Well?” Pansy says. Her stomach is growling- in all this battle of patience, they’ve missed dinner. She spots the hickeys Draco has given Blaise in their latest hook-up; the bruises mark his fear, and the Slytherin dungeons reek of desperation.

 

Blaise sighs. “He called it off.”

 

Pansy sits, and thinks this over. She’s used to their little side drama by now- Blaise has always wanted more than Draco is willing to give, and Pansy has watched this all with her stomach hurting, because school romances never really work.

 

Despite that, she still catches herself following the lines of Blaise’s throat as he laughs. Pansy has lived this year with her stomach hurting with the inevitable destruction of it all— Blaise cares more than Draco does, and it’s an unending cycle.

 

Pansy exhales in measured breaths. “I think,” she says carefully, “that you have always cared more than Draco does.”

 

Blaise’s face twists with the raw truth of it, and they sit in the stacks as dawn breaks out through the crystalline windows, streaking the room with golden sunlight. Pansy watches as the dust motes dance around her in unidentifiable patterns, and then leaves Blaise to go get a change of clothes and shower.

 

The year cramps on in horrible fits of dark magic, and Pansy is hysterical with the blood of it all. Draco cannot outright kill, but they both know that his family is on a clock, no matter what he does. The easiest thing, the most practical thing, is to corner Dumbledore when he is at his weakest and just do the curse, but Draco drags his feet for fear of becoming  the thing that he has always extolled.

 

The three of them fade into paper-thin cutouts of themselves, a strange tense wire running through the interactions. Blaise and Draco’s guaranteed finale, Pansy’s cold mouth and even colder hands. She dreams of chasing Muggles down the corridors of Hogwarts Castle, feet tripping clumsily over the cotton-like substance of it all.

 

She dreams of Riddle’s face appearing, telling her that Pansy has failed, and he draws a thin line of crimson down her forearm, and seizes a handful of dirt and digs it into her body. _Mudblood_.

 

Potter tracks them all, knowing that Draco is a Death Eater. The two of them face a cat-and-mouse game all year, catch me if you can. Pansy watches the match with a disaffected temper, not interested in delaying the outcome.

 

She doesn’t expect the outcome to be Dumbledore, dead. Draco is gone, showing up with shadows and tremors that Pansy can’t give him potions for, Blaise in hiding.

 

The Carrows rule the school, now, and Pansy draws her reputation around herself like a cloak. She watches, with hooded eyes and a barely-their-tremble, as Neville writhes on the floor, withstanding the same curse that caused his parents to never raise their kid.

 

She watches all of the Gryffindors seventh year. Understands that some of them do not know the difference between hot-headedness and the ability to be unquestionably brave, but envies their lack of self-control all the same. One by one, the Carrows cut into the Gryffindors, but Pansy notices that the same number of food is consumed, that the house-elfs still order the same amount of ingredients.

 

She doesn’t say anything, because it isn’t her place. In a place where the Unforgivable becomes the accepted, to each their own, Pansy supposes. The students have all chosen their own sides, and Pansy chooses her survival, and the freedom of choosing, whatever little their is.

 

When she shrieks to turn in Potter, and she invariably dooms Slytherin House to ostracization, Pansy’s chest burns with anger and embarrassment. Because they don’t _understand_. Pansy has gone to Malfoy Manor, has heard the shrieks of the people trapped in the basement, has felt Bellatrix’s eyes on her. She’s seen Voldemort, but has (thankfully) never had to speak in his presence.

 

But here’s the thing— she doesn’t understand everything either. Pansy hasn’t spent all her life knowing that one day she might die, or perhaps worse: kill someone. A someone who killed your parents, but still. To cast an Unforgivable is unforgivable for a reason; it takes all the good part of magic and distorts it until its a black fog of hatred and insanity..

 

So when shrieks, she still has that same indomitable air of knowledge clinging around her like a cloak of protection. It doesn’t matter anyways- they get sent down to the dungeons, and Festia glares at her with her chin quivering, grateful and angry at the same time.

 

Pansy spends her time snapping at the people who come her way, her lessons on how to stay out of the spotlight all but forgotten. She reminds people of a baby animal, quivering and afraid of the light it has discovered for the first time.

 

When they first feel the sounds of Voldemort’s army hitting the barrier, some girls try to Apparate out. It doesn’t work— the barrier is there to keep the students safe, and going outside merits, by some ancient knowledge, death to the magic seething in Hogwarts.

 

Pansy sits and thinks, and sits and thinks, and sits and thinks, her thumb nail reducing in on itself. They’re all practically sitting ducks; trapped in their dungeon, in their sanctuary of Hogwarts and Slytherin House itself, but Filch is still a Squib. Pansy learned how to Accio her wand a long time ago.

 

When she bursts out onto the main stories, its to see the people who once sat in her house killing the people who grew up next to her. Pansy does as much as she can, and aches in her stomach to make eye-contact with one of the teachers, but they all turn their face away, as if still in disgust of her actions.

 

 _Look_ , _I have come now. Isn’t it enough?_

**Author's Note:**

> The quote comes from a latin phrase. There will be a second chapter- come say hi to me on tumblr.  
> I'm @accio-idioto


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